


Repairer of the Fences

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29413371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Rey certainly never expected to become the sole inheritor of her caretaker's farm and lands, but then the Reverend Luke Skywalker was always known as something of an eccentric. After a life of belonging nowhere, and of being a nobody, it is a welcomed change.The sudden reappearance of Luke's purportedly long-dead nephew is a slightly less gladdening development, by comparison, but Rey could at least use an extra pair of hands for the winter.As for the rest of the man, she will have to find out.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 47
Kudos: 125
Collections: To Find Your Kiss: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [niennathegrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niennathegrey/gifts).
  * Translation into Français available: [Réparer les barrières](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29866749) by [traitor_for_hire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traitor_for_hire/pseuds/traitor_for_hire)



> I wasn't planning to do the exchange this year, but saw the following prompt and had to give it a try. I also got a late start on this treat, so this will need to be posted in pieces. My thanks for both your patience and the absolutely genius idea:
> 
> "historical AU a la Far From the Madding Crowd / Lady Chatterley's Lover - Ben comes back to his family's estate/farm, but in his absence, the property has passed to Miss Rey Nemo, ward of his uncle Luke, who isn't keen to give it up. Ben ends up working as the groundskeeper/gardener. Slow burn ensues."
> 
> EDIT: And I see that your assigned gifter was similarly inspired! I hope you can relish the double serving, at least.

…

 _1895_

Rey walks down from the chicken coop into the farmhouse through its unlocked back door to find a dead man standing in her pantry; he has unsealed a jar of spiced peaches and is eating them off the blade of a fighting knife with a polished red abalone handle. He does not turn to notice her.

She goes out again, her skirts still tucked up into her muddied boot-tops, and returns perhaps thirty seconds later holding Luke’s old carbine rifle. It is a .52 caliber Lightside Repeater and the noise its lever-action makes when she pumps a round into the chamber is as loud as the snap of a burning pine knot. 

The man stops.

He glances over his left shoulder at her. He has heavy black hair brushed to curl against his collar and the heels of his brogan shoes have been worn down to almost nothing along their outside edges, suggesting a slightly turn-toed walk. All the photographs Rey has ever seen of him – all two – have depicted him seated, either in a rocking chair or on the farmhouse front steps, and thus his height comes as something of a surprise. His head is almost level with the pantry door frame.

“Now, listen.” Rey pulls back the carbine’s hammer until it locks. “We can do this two different ways, except one way will make a mess of the kitchen and the other way won’t. Which do you prefer?”

“I have no idea.” The man eats a final peach before replacing the jar on its shelf and stepping out backwards from the pantry. “How good is your aim?”

“Good enough.” Rey braces her shoulder against the wall in anticipation of the carbine’s vicious kick and supposes it serves her right, relying upon the guardian services of a sheepdog who has gone half-deaf with age; she resolves to give Chewie a piece of her mind as soon as this jugglery business is resolved. “Who are you?”

The man slicks the knife clean against his trouser leg. His coat hangs sharply off his gaunt shoulders as though meant to fit a heavier man, or as though he himself was at one time a heavier man than he now appears. He turns the rest of the way towards her and there is a livid red scar that splits the length of his face into two unequal pieces. 

“I’ve come to speak with Reverend Skywalker,” he says. “And who are you, his cook?”

“Because if I didn’t know any better,” Rey feels an angry blood flame up in her cheeks, “I’d say you were his nephew, except everybody knows he’s been dead for ten years.”

It is closer to eight years, really, or maybe seven, but ten sounds better and makes Rey think of that old poem the sisters at Tuanul Orphanage once told her about, the story of the faithful wife who waited so long at her loom. Rey is not entirely sure if Luke’s dead nephew was properly named Ben or Benjamin, either, since she had received the story in bits and pieces over months and across many years, and has therefore assembled it like a patchwork quilt with a patchwork quilt’s uneven edges. Every Sunday she leaves flowers at a plot of graves above the orchard and wonders each time about that peculiar surname, derived from the Latin word _solus_ and denoting a piece of music that must be played without accompaniment. The flowers on the graves have progressed from snowdrops to daffodils to damask violets to blue chicory, from sunchoke to aster and goldenrod and the very last of autumn’s brilliant purple ironweed. 

The man drops his knife into its sheath. 

“That’s interesting news,” he says. “And how did I die, I’d like to know?”

Rey presses her lips against her teeth. 

“Maybe a grizzly in Montana ate you. Maybe you were prospecting for gold in the Sierra Nevadas and got buried in an avalanche. Maybe you threw in your lot with a gang of murderers and were hanged by a judge in Fort Smith. Whatever the case,” she brings up the carbine, with some difficulty but not without dexterity, “you’re either an imposter or an apparition from the pits of hell, and I don’t tolerate company like that around here.”

The man hesitates. His mouth works in silence, the skin along his scar twitching where a nerve has been severed and his fingers still stippling the knife’s red handle. His black coat is tattered along its hem and several of its various holes bear a more than passing resemblance to the scattershot marks made by a coach-gun; Rey wonders how he came here, whether he has traveled west from Boston or north from Springfield or east across the state border from Albany. It seems a marvel that any conductor would admit him onto a train, dressed as he is, even with modern standards of decency being so deplorably low as they are.

They hold each other fixed in a standoff silence for about ten seconds more before the man’s hand slips away from his knife.

“That floorboard there, under your foot.” He gestures with his chin. He wears a black neckerchief that has dust stuck inside its rough creases. “Stamp on it.”

Rey blinks. The kitchen’s windows face southeast to let in the October noontime sunshine. 

“What?”

“Stamp your foot.” His eyes are amber-yellow and remind her of a coyote’s, another detail necessarily omitted from those two old tintype photographs. “What do you hear?”

Rey lifts her heel to bring it down twice in a sort of flatfoot stomp. The action scatters caked mud off her boot and the sound it throws back is a hollow echo, like the thump inside a log. She has walked these floorboards ten thousand times — has lived in this farmhouse since she was thirteen years old — and has never given the noise a second thought.

“If you lift back that board,” the man says, “you’ll find a pack of playing cards — and a whiskey bottle with it, most likely.” His face seems to change briefly, in a shiver of the kitchen’s sunlight, but then nothing about the man’s face seems able to keep itself entirely still; his eyes and brows and mouth all move minutely, subtly, as though there are live wires running beneath them. “It’s the only place my father could keep it hidden from my mother.”

“We’ll see.” Rey lowers into a crouch. “Don’t move.”

Holding the rifle trained on him while nudging back the floorboard is something of trial, but Rey manages it; the board levers free with a spurt of dust and light touches on the dazzling umber of a whiskey bottle, swaddled in newspapers dated back to the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes and laid beside a deck of Italian-suited gambler’s cards with a white falcon printed onto their backs. Beneath them is a pair of dice covered in chipped gilt paint. 

Rey stands. 

“My name is Ben Solo,” the man says, “but you know that already, don’t you?”

Slowly, Rey lets the carbine fall, until the blued steel point of its bayonet rests balanced on the floor.

“I’m Rey.”

“Rey who?”

“Just Rey,” she says. “I was Reverend Skywalker’s ward.”

And then Ben Skywalker Organa-Solo, risen from the dead after these seven or eight or maybe ten years, turns his head at an angle and frowns. 

“Where is he?”

...

She serves him a midday dinner of brown bread spread with butter and molasses, a hoop of hard cheese and some Dudley apples that have been gathered in a barrel. Chewie lollops in through the kitchen’s opened back door, snuffles around Ben’s shoes for a minute with his moss-wet nose, and in a clatter of elbows he curls himself untroubledly down around Ben’s chair and goes right back to sleep. 

Rey turns away.

“I’m still surprised the news didn’t reach you.” She swings a kettle off the iron woodstove to pour him a cup of heated cider. “A reporter even came here from the _New York Tribune_ to write about it. He said it’s not often that a living legend dies.”

“That reporter didn’t know much, then. There’s legends dying all the time these days.” Ben eats with a hunched stolidity, the fixed purpose and posture of a starving man; Rey knows the look well. “But it wouldn’t have mattered. I came here from up in the Alaska Territory — the only way news gets out there is if an angel of the lord delivers it personally.”

“What were you doing in Alaska?”

“Nothing that mattered.”

Rey pours herself a cup of cider and assumes the seat opposite his at the kitchen table. 

In the short while it has taken her to prepare this small repast, she has also prepared a hundred possible answers to a hundred possible questions, of which Ben Skywalker Organa-Solo has not yet asked her a single one. Your uncle died on a rainy morning in March, she has prepared to tell him; it was sudden but it was easy; I found him in his chair and at first I thought he was asleep; I asked Reverend Dameron if he could give the sermon, even if Luke always considered Poe Dameron something of a cheeky rogue, and even if Luke disagreed with the Congregationalists on many key doctrinal points; I buried him at your mother’s right side, so that your father would remain at her left, although there was enough space between the two graves that I might’ve chosen otherwise; Luke never allowed me to lock the back kitchen door at night, on the chance that you should ever come home again at long, long last after it was dark and the rest of the world had pronounced you dead and there was nobody awake to let you in. 

“So where’d he find you?”

Rey glances up. Ben Solo has ceased pitching food into his mouth and is regarding her from somewhere far behind those penetrative yellow eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“Luke.” Ben sops his slathered brown bread in the apple cider. “He always took a special interest in orphanage benefits. Which one did he collect you from?”

Another angry flush sweeps through Rey’s face and she grips her cup. It is made from blue-painted porcelain; there is a matching cup she keeps hidden on the high shelf.

“Tuanul Orphanage,” she says. “It’s in Boston. The Church runs it.”

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen. Luke brought me here seven years ago.”

He evaluates her. His jaw is long and his features all seem to sit balanced over the centering gravity of that dolorous, unrestful mouth. 

“I see.”

Rey sets down her cup. “What precisely do you mean by that?”

“Whatever you think it means, I suppose.”

“For a guest, you’re not being terribly polite.”

Ben sets down his cup as well.

“And for a caretaker, you’re being terribly presumptuous. I’ve been called many things, but being referred to as a guest in my own house is a novelty.”

She is preparing to unload another volley of opinions on him, but this pronouncement brings Rey up short. She can distantly hear the chickens squallering in their coop on the hill, the sheep discussing politics in their pen and the horse Diomedes — called Dio — pacing his usual antic circles around the corral. Through the window Rey can see the arbor from which she has harvested seven summers’ worth of red Catawba grapes to make jellies and wine, can see the ice house into which she has hauled seven winters’ worth of blocks cut from the pond to pack in sawdust. 

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mr. Solo.” She stands. “Luke passed the farm to me, when he died. It’s in the will.”

Ben’s face goes blank as though a helmet visor has been slammed over it.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Go down to the probate court and find out for yourself,” Rey says. “If that doesn’t persuade you, I’m friends with a local constable who’d be quite happy to come up here and arbitrate the dispute — Finn has always envied the Western sheriffs their lively times." She punctuates this by making a fist. "I’m sure he wouldn’t mind serving you a few good bunches of fives.”

Ben’s wide hands are gripped around his cup, showing the places where his knuckles are split and chapped, but he keeps firmly in his seat. 

“Skywalker Farm is mine by right of blood.”

“It is mine by right of law.”

“My grandfather cleared this land and built this house.” His voice is tight through its center as though tethered by a short chain. “My grandmother planted the orchard. That stove you’re cooking on was a gift for my mother that my father brought here by wagon from New York City.”

“Yes, I can tell how very much it all mattered to you by the fact that you left it and didn’t come back for ten years.”

“You don’t know anything about me. I’d advise you not to speak as if you do.”

“And I will advise you in turn that I know my rights and know that I’m at full liberty to cast you from my house into the outer darkness if you insist on provoking me.”

“So you can keep the place all for your own, is that it? I’d like to see you manage it. Have you spent a winter on this farm by yourself yet?”

Rey would like to return an instantaneous parry, and tries hard to think of what her answer should be, but she hesitates too long and thus rewards him with his first victory. 

Because she has felt it coming, of course: she has sensed it in the chilled air and seen it in the stiff frosts on the mown hay fields, has perceived it in the delaying sunrises and the advancing sunsets as darkness burns her days shorter at both ends. It is an hour’s ride to town in Exegol even on a clear summer afternoon and winter up here behind the mountains always comes on like a siege, like an embittering war of attrition, so that Rey has been stocking the root cellar and seasoning the firewood and laying those withering flowers on the graves with the knowledge that this time she will have to pass through it alone. 

“What do you care?” she asks, finally. “Are you planning to offer yourself as my hired hand?”

“I will not work for the right to sleep in my own bed and eat at my own table, Miss Rey.”

And now it is his turn to hesitate too long, in delivering this riposte, and it is Rey’s turn to score a hit. She looks more closely at the bedraggled state of his coat, his ill-shaven cheeks and the spareness of his body inside its broad frame. This, she determines, ought to really fix his flint. 

“You haven’t got anywhere else to go, have you?”

The scar twitches again where it comes near the wick of his mouth. Its ragged texture ages him, somewhat, but if Rey’s patchwork-quilt timeline is approximately correct then Ben Solo cannot be much older than thirty.

“You weren’t what I was expecting to find,” he says. 

She scrapes away from her chair with a great deal of pomp and snatches up both his plate and his cutlery to deposit them in the kitchen’s dry stone sink. 

“Well that’s just cold coffee for you, now, isn’t it?” She kicks at the woodstove’s damper to smother its coals and realizes her muddy skirts have been hitched up high enough so that they show the frilly pink rick-rack on the knees of her underdrawers, but then she figures a border ruffian like him is impervious to scandal and does not bother to cover herself. “Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s duties I’ve got to attend to. We can discuss your possible working arrangements again more civilly over supper.”

“I already told you, I won’t labor to keep my place in a house that already belongs to me.”

“You can rest easy on that score, Mr. Solo. You wouldn’t be staying in the house. There’s a bunk above the wagonshed that’ll do well enough for you, I believe. I just patched the roof in August.”

She has not been able to retrieve the cup from him, he has been clenching it so ferociously, but now Ben stands and turns and hurls the kitchen door shut behind him as he goes out; from the porch Rey can see him tramping off through the fields, his strides savage and his fists clenched. He’s probably got lice, she thinks, I ought to dump him in a carbolic bath, and then she notes for the first time that Ben Solo walks with a pained, leaden limp at one side. She notes as well that Chewie has gone ambling after him. 

“Traitor,” she says. “Just see if I ever let you eat the scraps off my plate again.”

She levers water from an outside pump but sets the filled bucket down beside the dry sink while she goes upstairs. The white farmhouse with its green shutters is built generally in the style of a Greek revival, or so Rey understands it, but its roof follows a curious pattern of peaks and slants that make it hazardous to stand upright in certain places. There is a knitted blanket on the narrow slat-bed of her room and atop the dresser sits a sketchbook whose sheets have been sewn together with packing twine. 

Rey sits at the end of her neatly-made bed, stays there ten minutes, then dries her face with her apron and goes downstairs again to finish the dishes.

...

She had glimpsed him first through the orphanage’s second-floor banister, pausing to rest from her daily chore of sweeping the stairs. She had seen only the top of his head, a blonde like wet sand streaked with a gray like the fog off Boston Harbor, until he had folded his arms behind his back and Rey saw in addition that the old man’s right hand was made from wood. The bristles on her broom had scratched the wall and the man turned his face up towards hers; there was a white clerical cravat with stiff preaching bands in his collar, except Rey did not recognize him as one of the priests who said their daily masses. 

The sister he was speaking to had beckoned Rey down the stairs towards them. Beneath her starchy white habit Sister Lanai had a round, bulging face like a fish, a short squat body like a toad, but Rey had once gotten herself into a fight with a boy twice her size and Sister Lanai had lit after him brandishing a wash paddle; she had chased the boy clear down Hanover Street, clear to the Massachusetts State House, drubbing his ankles as she went and roaring oaths in what may have been Scottish Gaelic. 

“And who’s this?” the old man with the false right hand had asked; maybe he lost it in a duel, Rey had been thinking. Maybe he was a cavalry officer and fought the rebels in the War Between the States. 

“This young lady here is Remembrance,” Sister Lanai had answered, first. “Remembrance, this is Reverend Luke Skywalker. He was an old friend of Father Kenobi’s, longer ago than I care to admit.” 

“My name’s Rey,” had been Rey’s prompt correction. “Just Rey.”

“We call her our Young Joan of Arc,” Sister Lanai laughed. “Whenever she makes a choice, she makes it and runs to it at a full charge.”

The bearded man named for one of the four evangelists — Luke the Physician, Luke the Greek, Luke who was represented by the winged white ox — had raised his brows.

“An auspicious introduction,” he said. “And where are you from, Rey, Just Rey?”

She had accompanied Reverend Luke Skywalker on his tour through the orphanage and the center courtyard garden, showing him the patch where she grew her sunflowers, and when news got around that Miss Remembrance Nobody was being adopted it set Mr. Plutt the collier into a wild laughing fit.

“Bunkum,” he had said. “A man that age doesn’t want a brat your age unless he’s looking out for himself. Probably figures he’ll need somebody to empty his slop buckets and spoon-feed his soups, soon enough.”

Rey had picked up a piece of coal to chuck it at Plutt’s big greasy head. It hit him squarely on the nose. 

“If I meet you again down in hell, Mr. Plutt, I’ll be sure to tell you whether or not you were right.” 

Now Rey goes about her work with a vindictive intensity, after she is mostly certain Mr. Ben Solo the Undead has gone off somewhere to brood over his current predicament. When evening comes, which is around half-past five according to a pillar-and-scroll clock on the shelf, Rey washes at a basin and pins up her hair and puts on a white shirtwaist with a blue twillback skirt as evidence of her superior good breeding. She sets a second place at the table but leaves the plate empty; she lets it remain this way after she has finished eating and placed herself beside the sitting room’s stove with a shawl she is knitting from some spare yellow yarn. Her needles pause when she hears footfalls on the back porch. 

She turns her work to begin another row, counting purls as she goes so as not to spoil the pattern. A pair of beaten brogans comes into the sitting room and stops. 

“Miss Rey.”

“Quiet,” she says. “You’ll make me drop a stitch.”

To her mild incredulity and intrigue, he stays quiet. She reaches the end of the row and sets down the knitting in her lap. 

“All right.” She tips her chair back on its rockers in order to regard him from a more insouciant angle. “What is it?”

The vigor of his walk has warmed him enough that Ben has removed his big coat. Beneath it he wears a faded band-collar shirt with an unraveling vest and his suspenders are frayed around the clips; it also confirms Rey’s supposition that this afternoon’s meal was likely the first half-decent one he has eaten in a good long while. He holds the coat bundled close to his chest as if for want of something better to do with his hands.

“I didn’t begin things between us the way I should’ve,” he says. “That could have been done better, on my part.”

Rey lets the rocking chair drop. She puts aside her knitting to feed another log into the stove, rearranging the white embers with a poker, and only when it is stoked to her satisfaction does she turn with her sooty hands on her hips to address him. 

“Mr. Solo, I spent the first ten years of my life in a Manchester slum. If there was ever a time for better beginnings, I’ve long since passed it — all I’d like to know is whether or not you intend to accept my offer.”

“You haven’t made me an offer. You’ve only set disagreeable preconditions.”

There is a window in the sitting room with its curtains drawn aside and Rey can see her reflection there in the black glass: the winter, she remembers. The cold and the darkness and the mountain and the unanswering silence of the house. 

She turns back to Ben.

“Then I now graciously extend you my hospitality as the sole legal and recognized owner of Skywalker Farm,” she says. “In return you are welcome to make whatever use of yourself around here that you find you’re able— or not.” It is a night without wind and the room’s only sounds are the clanks and complaints from within the stove pipe. “Well?”

He waits without taking his eyes from her. She notes that the long scar changes its course at his jawline and continues on down his neck, beneath his collar, like those great fractures scientific men claim rest far below the earth. 

Rey had first discovered his photographs while she was searching for a tablecloth to use at Christmastime, extracting the tintypes from a rosewood hope chest and shaking them out of their crisp black paper sleeves. There had been others, as well, of an older man posed on horseback in a fringed, outlandish vest and a woman with her hair done up in elaborate braids, but it was the boy’s face that Rey had brought closer beneath a coal-oil lamp for study. In one he had been about ten years old and in the other he had looked maybe eighteen or twenty, which for Rey at thirteen had cloaked him in the clear, vast upper atmosphere of worldly experience. On the pictures’ pasteboard backs there had been two different dates in Luke’s southpaw-sloped handwriting, but the same name in both places, from the Latin word _solus_ like the unaccompanied music and like those graves up on the hill. 

Rey had put the two photographs back where she found them and locked the rosewood chest. 

An updraft from the fire makes the stovepipe roar and resound. Ben Solo removes an arm from beneath the bundled coat to offer Rey his hand. 

“Yes,” he says. “I accept.”

Rey comes forward to shake on their agreement, once, feeling the thorny calluses in his palm. Ben lets go first, going back into the shadows of the house to retrieve a bulls-eye lantern from where Rey keeps it hung on a nail beside the coats and the carbine. He lights the lantern with a sulfide match and is nearly at the door again before Rey speaks.

“So are you going to tell me where you’ve been, the last ten years?”

“No,” he answers. “I’ve only been gone for seven.”

He leaves the house and walks off into the blue-black night. By the sway of the lantern Rey can trace his progress, beyond the barn and the chicken coop and into the upper half-story of a wagonshed set far back against the trees, and she is still watching when this lantern is blown out and everything beyond the window goes dark.

… 

For the first two weeks Rey sees so little of him that his presence is evidenced almost solely by the cracked ice she finds on the rain barrel each morning, where he goes at dawn to wash his hands and shave his face. Milk from the goats is strained and bottled as if by ensorcellment; corn, oats, ground bones and eggshells and fish meal transfigure themselves into mash for feeding the chickens; the beehive is wrapped in tar paper against the cold and its entrance is barred with netted wire against the mice; she finds notes written in charcoal by a parsimonious, slicing hand, slipped beneath the door to inform her how the broad axe needs a new handle or the gate needs a new post. 

On a whole it is rather like living in the company of some benevolent fey creature, except Rey carries with her an inborn Briton knowledge of the fact that the fey do not dispense their favors for free. She grows so accustomed to seeing him without really seeing him, in fact, that one evening she looks up into the orchard and feels a hard, quick crack of superstitious terror through her heart when she finds him there in the twilight under the trees. 

He is walking towards the mountain and the woods; twenty minutes later he comes down again. He retrieves his supper from off the porch where Rey has left it in a pail. 

She takes to scrutinizing his work, whatever trace he leaves of it. She examines the angle at which he has split a certain piece of poplar with the maul — but the grain in poplar wood is as smooth as water, she thinks, it splits true every time — and the manner in which he has harnessed Dio to the wagon. It had taken Rey more than a year to learn such things, another six months to do them as well as Reverend Skywalker believed they ought to be done; she had gone to bed each night with a sore back and a deep-bruised, sullen temper, although she had always returned to her various humiliations the next day like a Gettysburg artilleryman mustering to greet another barrage. 

“I’m good at all sorts of things,” she had once announced, seated before a dispiriting production of lumpish wheat cakes. “You just don’t care. I could probably filch the buttons right off your waistcoat and you’d be none the wiser.”

Reverend Skywalker had risen from his seat, retrieved a blank book with its pages stitched together by coarse twine, and in red pencil he had sketched two plants; his false right hand kept the book steady while he worked. Rey watched him.

“This is pokeberry,” he had said. “It’s used for making dyes, but you can’t eat it. And this is a black walnut, which you can. You’ve got to peel away the soft green shell here to get at the part you want — do you think you can find them? They’ll be of somewhat more use to you than stolen buttons, I'd imagine.”

Rey had scoffed, clamped the sketchbook under her arm and returned the same afternoon with her dress pockets crammed full of walnuts, her sleeves bespattered in pokeweed stains. She had held up a page covered with new drawings.

“What’s this flower called?” she had asked. “And this tree, what’s that?”

Rey walks along her beds of dog rose and lavender to see that Ben has already mulched them for the winter. There is a new creep put up in the sheep pen, as an early preparation for the spring lambs, and the fence-palings are all nailed precisely nine inches apart; Rey brings out a measuring rod to be certain. Chewie never barks at him or tries to eat his shoes. 

But he was born here, she tells herself. He was raised here. Naturally, he would have the advantage.

She sees him go off into the hills on another evening, and another, and another; the fifth time, Rey tosses an old buffalo-hide coat over her shoulders to follow him. 

The tall grass in the orchard conceals several rotten windfall apples within its tangles and her feet squelch down on them. There is a dirt path through the woods that leads to a great granite rock and then forks. Down one way is the spring-fed pond, where Rey catches her trout and cuts her ice; up the other way is the high meadow, set just far enough above the trees that it affords a long view down into the valley and over the rooftops of the town. On the southern edge of the meadow is a little plot of five graves surrounded by a split-rail fence. 

Rey ascends through the fast-gathering sundown and finds Ben standing there. Her dried flowers have not been removed. 

She steps into the clearing but comes no further. Ben keeps his head bent, his feet slightly apart and his hands tucked into his pockets, the overall composure of a man who has opted to make his fate a sort of voluntary affair. It is the posture in which Rey had most often imagined him, that phantasmal dark-eyed figure from the tintype photographs whose dimensions she could expand or collapse like the character in a dime-novel according to her childhood moods. He has existed in a sort of mythic space, over the last seven years, self-contained and inaccessible to the ordinary experiences of suffering and sorrow and regret, and somehow Rey has thus far forgotten that he is an orphan, too. 

“Did Luke ever tell you why I left?”

She startles. His position has not changed and thus he seems to have put this question to the mountain that rises beyond the meadow. The ridgelines run straight north, on the maps, and they become the Green Mountains somewhere up in Vermont, although geologically speaking they are all a part of the Appalachians that were born before history from titanic collisions between the continents. 

“No,” Rey answers. “He didn’t.”

“I made a whole litany of reasons for myself,” Ben says, “but mostly it was because I didn’t want to be buried less than a quarter-mile from where I was born.”

Rey turns towards the view down into the valley. The retreating sunlight has paused briefly on the surrounding mountaintops as though to rest its feet. “The quarter-mile makes a considerable difference, though. On a clear day you can probably see for fifty miles.”

“Yes.” Ben looks over his shoulder, although not by enough that Rey can study his face. “That’s why my grandfather chose it.”

“You wouldn’t have chosen it for yourself?”

“I certainly wouldn’t have made the choice believing it should dictate what a boy growing up several decades later could or couldn’t do with his life.” The horizontal sunlight strikes his eye; he looks around at the graves again. “Then one day I found myself a thousand miles away and realized it was still the same life, wherever I went. I figured I might as well be a miserable fool here as anywhere else.”

Rey’s fingers are cold. She pulls them into the buffalo-hide coat’s thick sleeves. “Why didn’t you come home sooner?”

Ben takes a hand from his pockets, goes down to one knee — the lamed leg gives him some trouble— and swipes grime away from the letters of his father’s name: Han like the name Johannes, who lays beside Leia like the name of Israel’s first wife, who lays beside Padme like the lotus-flower pedestal of a goddess from the East Indies, who lays beside Anakin Skywalker. 

“It was never in the same direction as I was going.” Ben pauses. “And it was a long journey. I could only afford to do it once.”

“Once would’ve been enough,” Rey says. “Luke would have asked you to stay.”

“I know.” Ben shifts his eyes to the ironweed flowers at the base of his mother’s headstone, still striking despite where their leaves and purple florets have browned. “I haven’t thanked you yet for bringing those. They were her favorites.”

He does not rise again, keeping his fingers on the grave’s flecked gray stone. Rey walks down to the farmhouse with its lighted windows; when he comes to fetch his supper from the back porch she is waiting there for him.

“I only told you to sleep in the wagonshed,” Rey says. “I never told you to take all your meals there, too.”

Ben hesitates, one foot on the porch and one on the path to the dooryard gate, but when she stands aside he goes past her into the house. She breaks the bread she has made and gives him half; he eats it, in silence, and Rey thinks it best not to ask him why he is weeping. 

Perhaps this would not change anything for him, either.

…

There are several brief squalls in late October, bringing wet flakes the size of three-cent pieces that melt within the hour, but the first real snow comes the second week in November on the feast day for Saint Martin of Tours. It measures six inches on the roof below Rey’s bedroom window but piles higher against the house and barn, its drifts as smooth as the breasts of mourning doves; she finds Ben attempting to break the rain barrel’s ice with a mattock she keeps for stripping tree bark. 

“There’s some water heating on the stove.” She has opened the kitchen window to speak with him. It tumbles flour-light snow off the casement and onto his bowed head. “Unless this is really meant to be a ritual mortification of the flesh you’ve got to engage in every morning. I still don’t understand what’s usually expected of you Lutheran men.”

“Luke was the Lutheran.” Ben fluffs the snow from his hair. “My father was an agnostic.”

“The elbow-shaker with the golden dice? That’s a surprise.” She pulls her head inside but leaves the window sash raised about an inch; she shouts so he can hear her. “I kept trying to tell Luke he should think about indoor plumbing, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“Of course not,” Ben calls in reply. “That’s for city folk.”

“What is? Listening?”

“It’s not manners to be fresh with your elders, Miss Rey.”

“I’m only supplying you with the facts, Mr. Solo. They’ve got these pumps now that can bring up the water straight from your own well. I’ve been reading about them in _The American Engineer_.”

He appears at the door and bangs his feet clean against the stoop. His ears and nose are pinked from the cold. 

“But then you’d need electricity for the pump.” He stands still while Chewie nudges around inside his coat pockets, searching out the hidden rinds of bacon. “If you go that far, you might as well install a daytime telephone service and be done with it.”

Rey attempts to picture this. She would keep a table in the parlor especially for her telephone, she decides, one with brass fittings and a crank handle and cream-painted finish, and whenever she wanted to talk to anybody at all in the whole country she could simply call the central operator and the operator would know just what to do; if anybody wanted to talk with her, they would do the same thing, and then her telephone would ring so she could come running right away to answer it. 

She turns back to the hot-cakes she is making on a soapstone griddle. 

“Maybe I’ll do it.” Rey flips all the cakes over. Their batter sizzles. “A telephone could be fun.”

“Telegrams are an aggravation enough.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never gotten one.”

He pours the heated water into a pottery bowl in a mushroom of steam and unsheathes his knife with the red abalone handle. Its steel sings out several times against the bowl’s edge while he sharpens it. 

“Telegraph offices will charge you upwards of twenty cents a word.” He puts the knife aside to roll up his sleeves. “Nothing anybody could possibly have to say is worth that much.”

“The Nevada Territory telegraphed its entire constitution to Washington a few days ahead of the 1864 election. They needed to become a state so Mr. Lincoln could get their votes in the electoral college — something like that would be worth the money, wouldn’t it?”

“And then six months later Lincoln was dead,” Ben says. “In the end it didn’t do them any good.”

Rey returns peevishly to her griddle.

“Still.” She scrapes the edges with her spatula. “I like the general principle.”

“Hm.”

Rey transfers the cakes onto a plate. The only modern curiosities Luke had thoroughly and truly enjoyed, as she recalls, were the gramophone and those newfangled marshmallows made from instant gelatin; the wax cylinder gramophone had lasted them three years, before it broke, and the whole allure of the gelatin marshmallows from Luke’s studious perspective was dropping them into the hot chocolate they drank from their matched blue-painted porcelain cups and watching them dissolve like manna in the desert. 

Ben does not speak any further, although Rey glances several times at his back while he leans over the bowl to blade his lathered cheeks with the knife. He has taken a mirror from his coat and propped it in an opened cupboard at eye level; it is one of those little pocket mirrors, with an advertisement for patent medicines on its back, and Rey squints to read the words _Dr. Hux’s Superior Bile Activator_ in red lettering. When this is finished Ben cups the water in his hands and brings it to his face, combing it through the roots of his hair with his fingers. He eats several hot cakes out of a rather perfunctory courtesy before going back into the cold at his usual dogged, hitched pace, and by noon all the dove-smooth snow has been pockmarked by his cloddish footprints. 

He rides down into Exegol the next day with Dio and the sled for a litany of dry goods Rey has requested —cornmeal, vinegar, bolts of calico, coal oil, humbug candies — and upon his return late that evening he presents Rey with a small yellow card. It has been sent via the American Telephone and Telegraph Company between the offices at Williamstown and Exegol, although by Rey’s estimation Williamstown is an additional five miles away.

 _MISS REY - STOP_ , the telegram reads. _TRUST THIS FINDS YOU WELL - STOP. NO HUMBUGS SO BOUGHT CARAMELS INSTEAD - STOP. SIGNED BEN._

Rey looks up from her telegram; Ben is counting out the remainder of the money she had given him that morning and presents her with a dollar and fifteen cents. 

“I was going to have it signed ‘Yours Most Sincerely,’” he drops the change into her hand, “but that would’ve set you back another nickel.”

“Oh.” She stays this way, holding the money and the telegram. “It’s all right. Mr. Shakespeare says that brevity is the soul of wit.”

Ben unravels a caramel from its paper wrapping and crackles it against his teeth. “‘And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes.’”

He goes off to unload the sled’s supplies — he’s probably got a college education, Rey guesses; he’s probably slept in hotels that had indoor plumbing with faucets for the hot and cold — and she sticks the folded telegram into her apron band. 

...

Another storm rolls down off the mountains late on Thursday afternoon. The snow is as fine and weightless as sand, this time, but it falls in stinging scythes of wind that turn it almost sideways. Rey’s boxwood wall thermometer on the porch informs her that it is twenty-six degrees outside, down five degrees from the same time yesterday. 

She wraps a shawl four times about her head to wade the several hundred feet between the farmhouse and wagonshed; Ben has shoveled some smoldering coals into an iron hod and is holding his damp woolen socks over the heat to dry them. 

“Come inside the house,” she says. “If you freeze out here I won’t have any place to put your body until the spring thaw.”

Ben stands on one long leg and then another, like a great blue heron, wriggling into his socks. “Far be it from me to refuse such a courteous invitation.”

He brings with him several pieces of leather tacking that need a saddlesoap scrub. He keeps himself out from under Rey’s feet, as she makes their supper, but he builds up a fire inside the sitting room’s stove before she comes in with her sketchbook. He has taken a slender volume of Greek drama down off the shelf — Euripides’s _Helen_ , its cover says — and has his back mostly towards her while he reads; it shows a pale triangle of skin at the nape of his neck, where there are several stray birthmarks similar to the ones on his face. Rey bends up her knees into the chair and takes out her sharpened pencil. 

She is drawing birds. There is a banditry of chickadees around which she works several larger cardinals and juncos, positioning a nuthatch along the paper’s edge so that he appears to be hopping his way down the page. She tries to fit a yellow-shafted flicker but finds she only has room to draw the bird’s head with its sharp, gleaming woodpecker beak. She keeps rotating the book so that oil from her palms will not smudge the lines. They had at one time all been simply birds to her, little ones or big ones, but as she learned their names from Luke she had written them down on the sketchbook’s interior cover and imagined personalities to match them: chipping sparrow, swamp sparrow, fox sparrow, goldfinch, bluebird, scarlet tanager, mockingbird, warbler, towhee, whippoorwill. 

A floorboard creaks. Rey glances up to discover Ben at her shoulder, studying the drawings under her hands. He holds his head to one side.

“Did you teach yourself this?”

Rey finishes shading a feather before she answers. There is an elm that grows beside the house and she listens to its branches heave and swing like a tide.

“Mostly,” she says. “There was a sister at Tuanul Orphanage — she realized I hated to talk when I was angry, so she’d give me some newsprint broadsheets and tell me I could only stop after I’d filled all the empty spaces.”

She had not drawn any real pictures at first, strictly speaking. They had been great indecipherable scribbles, single lines that crossed backwards on themselves a thousand times and that had been impressed deep into the soft paper by the plumbago pencil’s splintered tip and by the manic efficiency of her rage. Whenever Rey tried to follow this scribble from its beginning to its end she had always lost her way, somewhere in between; she had balled each paper tightly up to burn it in the furnace, and then one day she had put her pencil to the paper’s center instead and drawn a single path that circled outward and outward until her lines jumped free from the paper's borders.

“What a pretty picture,” Sister Lanai had said, when she came to examine the finished work. “You’ve built a labyrinth for yourself.”

“No I haven’t,” said Rey, who had been reading a book of mythologies from the Boston circulating library. “A labyrinth’s what they trap monsters inside of.”

“A labyrinth is not always meant to be a maze. Sometimes it is a meditation exercise— it offers a single path, and you walk it both ways.” Sister Lanai had followed the line with a stubby finger. “There’s a lovely one on the floor of Chartres Cathedral, if my memory serves me correct.”

Rey had kept the drawing for a day, studying it under her bedcovers after the lights were put out, and the next morning she had dropped it off one of the wharves into the harbor. Her next picture had been a huge tree with bare, twisted branches. 

Ben reaches past Rey’s shoulder to grasp the sketchbook’s upper corner. 

“May I see?”

Rey lifts the book to him and watches his eyes as the pages tick past. Once or twice he pauses. 

“This is the Takodana School.” He points. The picture in question is of a red schoolhouse built beside a haunt of birches. “When did they put up a new weathervane?”

“Last year,” Rey says. “A lightning storm took off the old one — it was the same storm that brought down all the maple trees I used for sugaring, out by the pond.”

“There’s better ones over on Threepio’s land. He’ll give you free passage to them if you ask.”

“Who?”

Ben flicks ten pages in reverse and turns the sketchbook around to show her a kit-kat portrait, a small elderly man with narrow shoulders supporting a protuberant head and pince-nez glasses that give him a look of polite indigestion. The man had sat for this drawing while at his office desk, as a barter for a two-dollar fee Rey had not been able to pay him, and had worried so much over the correctness of his pose that Rey threatened to hold him in place with woodworking clamps. He had let her keep the drawing, afterwards.

“Him.”

“Mr. Olivier?” Rey asks. “He’s the town clerk.”

“Philip Pericles Paternoster Olivier,” Ben pronounces. “Threepio — my father was the one who thought up the nickname. If he doesn’t answer to it anymore, it means the man’s finally acquired some dignity.” He turns to another page covered in sketched flowers, bloodwort and marsh marigold and blooming mountain laurel. “I see Luke turned you into an herbalist.”

“Not really. I didn’t get much further than learning to boil some tinctures.”

“That’s further than I ever got.”

He rests an elbow on her chair-back to turn more easily through the rest of her sketchbook, his lips pushed out slightly in contemplation. There are many pictures of Chewie; there are several of Dio, or at least his head, of the sheep and the chickens in twos or threes; there is one of Finn, dressed in his Sunday suit and standing in a way that Rey had said would make him look like Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves; there is one of Luke’s wooden right hand, which he had left on occasion hanging by its leather braces from the coat rack or else had propped in the umbrella stand; there are none of Luke himself. Rey had started about a half-hundred of them, collectively, but had wiped them all clean with her rubber eraser or else had torn them from the book because the eyes or the mouth or the lines of the face were somehow wrong. 

“I wish you’d let me see them anyway,” Luke had said, once, standing up from where Rey had posed him under the elm. “There’s no need to be so proud about it. Every picture teaches you something.”

Rey had clutched the sketchbook fast to her chest as he came over to peer down at it.

“Not this time,” she had told him, then and in repetition every time after. “The next one will be better.”

Ben reaches the end of the sketchbook with its list of birds, warbler and towhee and whippoorwill. He gives it back to her.

“There’s some pink moccasin flowers that grow in the woods behind the meadow, in June,” he says. “You haven’t drawn any pictures of those yet, have you?”

“No.” She keeps the sketchbook closed. “I’ll be sure to go and find them.”

He returns to his Euripides; Rey returns to her drawings. The storm passes on its way further northeast and the mercury in her boxwood thermometer now reads fifteen degrees, so she passes him some laundered sheets and an afghan from the linen chest but catches herself before she attempts to direct him up the stairs to the corner bedroom. They part ways on the landing and Rey lies awake a long time, listening to the whistle and sigh of the wind as it seeks out the cracks in the walls. 

...

It is warm for several days, after this, so that the snow melts into a hard crust on the grass and sticks quick as flocking-powder to the trees still bearing their last yellow leaves. Ben removes himself to the wagonshed again, although not before Rey pursues him with a measuring tape from her sewing basket and ensnares him by the throat.

“I’ve got to get your collar size — now spread your arms.” He does as requested; Rey writes down the breadth of his wingspan on a slip of paper, six feet and three inches between the fingertips on his right and left hands. “You can’t go on wearing that same old shirt and coat all winter. We can get you a whole wardrobe from the Sears-Roebuck catalog for five dollars.”

“Don’t put yourself through the trouble.” He holds his neck straight while Rey loops her tape around his waist. “A man once told me I could keep myself warmed in a prairie blizzard with just the energy I wasted on all the arguments I was bound to lose against him anyway.”

“Which man was that?”

“He was a horse-dealer out in Nebraska,” Ben says. “We made a trial of being business partners, for a while.”

“How’d it pan out?”

“Poorly.” He lifts his arms slightly for her; she is close enough that his knees brush the folds of her skirt. “Snoke didn’t much like answering to any authority except his own.”

Rey stops the measuring tape in place with her thumb. “Where is he now?”

There is the briefest possible pause, although it is as deep as the cleft between two opening notes in a song.

“Dead,” Ben says. “He’s been dead about two years, now.”

Rey steps around him to measure the height of his back, from the tailbone to the tops of his shoulderblades, which is not necessary but is the only modest privacy she can quickly give him.

“Well.” She keeps her fingers pinched so that she will not have to touch him more than necessary. “That’s at least one other authority he was answerable to, in the end.”

“It was.”

She questions him regarding his favorite color — Ben claims not to have one — and requests his hat size — Ben evokes his rights under the Fifth Amendment in withholding this information — but is able to wrangle out the fact that he would accept a new pair of boots, except for the expense; Rey has some money put aside from selling her shoat-pigs the previous spring and claims she will enjoy playing the role of a spendthrift. She had originally planned on saving up this money as a gift for Luke, a Sholes and Glidden typewriter to compose those manuscripts he never finished, but she sees nothing educational in telling Ben this. At the last moment of decision she adds a black opera cloak to the catalog order, merely to rile him. 

It is warm for three days more, so that snowmelt puddles the yard, and one morning Rey wakes before it is light to a sound of pandemonic screaming.

Her mind detaches itself the rest of the way from whatever dream it has been in, by which time she is already out of bed and into her boots, and she comprehends what the raucous screaming means; something has gotten inside her chicken coop. 

The big carbine will likely do her no good, in that small, tight space and against something that doubtless has better eyesight and reflexes than she does, so Rey scrabbles under the bed for a box that contains a six-shot revolver with a swing-out cylinder — loading gates are better, Luke had told her, it makes you think a bit more about every bullet — and she goes pounding downstairs in her nightdress. 

There is no moon and Rey navigates the distance largely by intuition, tripping only once in the process. Her hens are Rhode Island Reds, save for a speckled Plymouth Rock who collects colored pebbles, and they all possess the hysterical, brittle temperaments of those women in English novels who are forever complaining about their nerves. Something has torn back the coop’s fencing and please, Rey thinks, please, at least don’t let it be a bear, and please let me get there before Chewie does, because that son of a bitch will try to give a good account of himself no matter how old he really is. 

The chickens are making such a catawampus racket from their commingled fear and indignation that the noise crowds painfully into Rey’s head. She swings the gun up and fires her first shot into the air; inside the coop there is a snarl. 

“Out,” she bellows. “Get out. Shoo.”

She kicks through the gate into the coop, stepping over the scattered feathers and the hens as they flail about. A shadow parses itself from the others in a protracted leap; she fires twice more. The revolver’s muzzle flash blinds her, both times, the reports coming like whip-cracks, but her vision clears in time to watch the long legs and docked tail of a bobcat rush through the torn fence and away across the fields.

The chickens all give her an aggrieved look. 

“You girls need to learn a few things about keeping your heads in a crisis.” Rey lowers her gun. “One of Mr. Darwin’s pupils thinks you’re linearly descended from the dinosaurs — try and act like it, once in a while.”

She stands breathing hard in the dark. Her heart is bucking so violently it shakes her chest and hands and skull, and the pulse rockets into her mouth again when there is a slight, perturbed cough from the far corner of the coop. Seven years of Luke’s strict trigger discipline instruction is more or less all that keeps Rey from firing a fourth time, and then the starlight articulates Ben standing there with the broad axe in one hand. The other hand is flat against his side.

“Ben?” Rey has not gotten the wind fully into her lungs. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Miss Rey,” his voice is hoarse, though rather meek, “but you’ve shot me.”

Rey pauses. There is a ringing in her ears and the old nightdress she wears has a green gingham pattern. 

“I beg your pardon?”

He leans heavy on her as they stagger back together into the house; she does not wish to try her luck with the stairs and thus deposits him on a divan in the sitting room before bringing a lighted lamp. Her bullet has only winged him, from what Rey can see through his coat, but blood keeps rising between her fingers no matter how she presses onto the wound. She harries about the kitchen like a vexed goose, expending her entire lexicon of curses several times over, and Ben watches her from under drowsily hooded eyes. There are chicken feathers caught in his hair. 

“If it’s any consolation,” he says, slurring only somewhat when he does, “it’s rare that abdominal wounds like this prove rapidly fatal.”

“That isn’t a consolation in the slightest.” She uncorks the old whiskey bottle from beneath the floorboards, the one his father kept hidden beside the playing cards and gilded dice. “You’re bleeding on my furniture.”

“This is my furniture,” he stops to take a guttural breath, “and I will bleed on it however much it pleases me.”

He jerks to alertness when Rey dumps out the whiskey over his wound, but he holds his shirt up dutifully while she opens a medicine pannier to retrieve the rolled cotton dressings and a brown bottle of silver chloride antiseptic. She keeps the dressings wadded in place until the bleeding slows; he sits up with pained tenderness and Rey kneels between his legs to bind his waist in the long strips of bandaging, reaching her arms around him so that she can pass the roll rapidly between her fingers. Her mouth is somewhat muffled where it is tucked against his shoulder by this arrangement.

“I can’t imagine what you thought you were doing out there,” she says.

“Protecting your livestock.” He flinches from her hands like a skittish horse. “I had no way to know you’d come blazing in like some El Paso pistolera.”

“Ah, so it’s your furniture but my livestock, is it? That’s a nice piece of sophistry if I ever heard it. I’m sure you’ll apply it next time the sheep pen needs a cleaning, too.”

“I have no quarrel with sheep. I just make it my business to have as little to do with chickens as possible.” His breathing is regular but rather shallow. “I’ve met roosters who would’ve gone up and fought God, if only they’d been able to fly higher.”

She laughs, helpless to halt herself and still weak through the limbs and innards and heart from fear. His blood has gotten onto her hands and nightgown, and within her encompassing arms she can feel his big warm body beginning to tremble. She pulls away; his eyes are closed.

“I’ll ride to get Doctor Holdo in the morning,” she says. “I don’t want to leave you here alone yet.”

Ben falls back against the divan. “I don’t know a Doctor Holdo. Who is he?”

“She,” Rey says.

“She,” he repeats, and opens his eyes again; there is something unfamiliar there, vulnerable and startled by its own afflicting vulnerability. “It’s all right, Rey. I’ve survived worse.”

Rey is shifting through the medicine pannier for something to dull the pain, but she stops. His scar stands out as a harsh, raw red against the pallor of his face; she reaches over to nit-pick the chicken feathers from his hair.

“Is that another of your shoddy attempts at consolation?”

“Possibly.”

“You can knock under with it, then — and stop talking while you’re at it, if you please.”

“Yes, Miss Rey.”

Rey must rouse him one more time, in order to put a clean sheet beneath him and a clean blanket over him. When he finally falls into a frangible, bloodless sleep she goes away to wash her hands, to change the ruined gown, but she comes back again to sit with him and stays like this until the daybreak. 

…


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was originally planning to make this two or three chapters, but it seems more sensible to break it up into even pieces, so here we go.

…

The town’s principal censure regarding Doctor Amilyn Holdo has nothing whatsoever to do with her being a woman, generally speaking, and everything to do with the way in which she has never made any discernible efforts to conceal or excuse the fact. An authentic lady-doctor ought to wear trousers and spectacles and keep her hair cropped above her ears, to wobble her way up the narrow mountain roads of Exegol astride a safety-bicycle and smoke Tatooine Tobacco from a pipe, or at the very least from rolled paper cigarettes; by comparison Doctor Holdo goes about most places afoot, wearing a double-breasted gray jacket with leg-o-mutton sleeves and brass buttons that have earned her the nickname of the Admiral, and around her tall wineglass throat she usually wraps a long, dancing scarf dyed a Tyrian purple that makes her visible from a half-mile’s distance. She appears at the door wearing paper hair curlers after Rey has stood in the yard perhaps five minutes, flinging snowballs and stones at her upper windows. 

“I’ve got a gunshot man in my house,” Rey says. She has ridden Dio so hard her feet are numb from keeping balanced in a two-point position above the saddle. “I need you to come and tend him, please.”

Doctor Holdo untwists a paper curler from her hair. She wears a flannel house robe with a revolver in the pocket. “Who shot him?”

“I did.” Rey’s cheeks would likely show a blush, except the brisk morning air has cut them to ribbons and she can feel them only a little more than her feet. “He’s my farmhand. I didn’t do it a-purpose.”

“Plenty of people will shoot a man without any useful purpose in mind, Miss Rey. You’re in good company.” She rakes out the remaining hair curlers and goes to fetch her purple scarf. “What was his condition when you left him?”

Doctor Holdo unwinds this scarf after Rey has led her up the farmhouse’s front steps into the sitting room. She stands rolling it counterclockwise around her hand as she studies Ben lying on the divan. 

“This is Luke Skywalker’s nephew,” she says, “isn’t it?”

Rey draws up a rattan-bottomed chair. “Yes.”

“How long have you had him here for?”

“A little more than a month.”

Doctor Holdo sets her physician’s bag atop the proffered chair to wash her hands in the water Rey has drawn for her. “Mr. Mitaka down at the mercantile store was telling people he'd seen Ben Solo come in asking to buy a bag of fifty caramels. I believe everyone thought it was a joke.”

“It was,” Ben says, without opening his eyes. “Dopheld Mitaka can’t count that high.”

Doctor Holdo gives him an arch look but moves forward to loosen his bandages. After this she speaks only when telling Ben to turn this way or that, to take large breaths or let them out while she pats her stethoscope’s bell along his back. Rey waits, arms crossed and clasping her elbows; the wound is cleaned again and Doctor Holdo dresses it with gauze sterilized by steam and pressure. Together they maneuver Ben up the stairs — it is fractionally less cumbersome than carrying a tall chest of drawers along the same course — and into the largest of the three bedrooms, to which Rey owns a key on the same ring that opens all the other doors in the house. Inside is a four-poster bed with a white counterpane and a looking-glass on the washstand. She has kept it locked since Luke’s death, except to turn and air it once a week like the room of a roadside inn. 

They dress Ben in one of Luke’s old shirts, as well, taken from the bureau and still crisp from the last time Rey ironed it on washing-day. Doctor Holdo nods circumspectly to her and Rey leaves while the rest of Ben’s clothes are changed. She waits in the hall — that scar ends all the way down on his chest, she thinks, it must have been a single unwavering slash — until Doctor Holdo comes out again. 

“I didn’t stitch him up,” she says. “With a wound like that, we’re better off leaving it open. Your work will be to keep it clean and keep him rested until it mends — be sure to get him up for walks, though. That’ll keep the blood from clotting.”

“He’ll recover, then?”

“So long as you can refrain from shooting him again,” Doctor Holdo says, and they are half-way down the stairs before she finishes this thought in a tight, elusive voice, “although I might enjoy taking a shot myself at whatever incompetent ass stitched up his face and set those bones in his leg.” 

Rey goes to a box on the mantelpiece where she keeps her money and takes out the three dollars for Doctor Holdo’s fee. She pauses to smooth the bill’s wrinkles. “Can you tell how it happened?”

“A big fixed-blade knife with a clipped point would’ve done the trick — the leg was probably broken in at least four places along the femur and tibia.”

“What could do that, do you think?”

“The legal ramifications of physics, technically speaking. Either a streetcar ran him over or he took a bad fall, and in that case it was a long hard way down.” She accepts the money but gives Rey several more packages of the sterilized gauze in exchange. “He didn’t leave town on especially amicable terms with his uncle, I’ve heard. Has he told you anything about where he’s been?”

Rey pauses. 

“Not really.”

Doctor Holdo follows her into the sitting room to retrieve her physician’s bag. She spends a few deliberate moments putting on the purple scarf. 

“Will you be all right alone here with him, Miss Rey?”

Rey is gathering up the sheets and the blanket speckled with Ben’s blood. She will need to give everything a hard bluing rinse, while the divan will likely require new upholstery, and she has been planning the disposal of his old clothes for more than a week anyway as if plotting a political assassination. Outside the sun has arced above the barn and the trees and now the house’s southeast roof burbles with melting snow; Luke had baptized his nephew in this same sort of rimpling, glacial water, he told her, collected and blessed in a cup at the second-floor window because the boy had been born feet-first and the physician had not expected him to live out the day. 

"They didn't?" Rey had been seated beside Luke on the pond’s bank and waiting for her fishing-line to wiggle. She thought again about the face of the dark-eyed boy from those tintype photographs. “Did you think he was going to die, too?"

"Of course not," Luke had said. "I baptized him so we’d finally have an end to his parent’s arguments about what to call him.”

“What’d they choose?”

Luke had kept his eyes on the water. It cast shifting lattices of reflected green-gold light into his face. “Ben.”

“Really?” Sunlight had illumined the pond’s soft, sunken brown leaves, gathered over the seasons beneath its shallows. Rey watched banded killifish the size of quilting needles dart through her shadow. “That was Father Kenobi’s name.”

“It was.”

“So why doesn’t Ben ever come to visit you?”

“He left. It was a short while after his mother died. I woke one morning and he was gone — he didn’t take anything with him.”

“Where was he going?”

“I’m not sure he knew.” Luke had watched a dragonfly leap over the water. “He was like his father, in that respect.”

They had sat the whole rest of the afternoon there, on the pond’s bank, but had caught only a brook trout they kept and a pumpkinseed fish they threw back — Rey liked this part best, feeling the powerful lash of the fish’s tail as it flew from her opened hands — and when she went up to the farmhouse she had put her head beneath the pump and soused it with bright, cold water until her neck and ears stung. 

Rey turns away from Doctor Holdo and goes to deposit the bundled sheets in a washtub. She will have to go out later with a rake to punch down those ice dams on the roof, too. 

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “If Mr. Solo meant to do me any harm, I’d have known it long before now.”

Doctor Holdo drinks a stiff cup of chicory coffee before she leaves. While turning out the pockets of Ben’s tattered coat Rey discovers nothing but a few caramel wrappers, three pennies, his ticket from a recent voyage on a Lake Ontario side-wheeler and a woman’s tortoiseshell hairpin, which is all in all the sort of ordinary gullyfluff found in the pockets of any man’s coat and of no poetic or prosaic use to her. His belt with its red-handled fighting knife hangs off a chair and Rey draws it — the blade is about ten inches long — to study its point. 

The knife is slapped back into its sheath. 

She throws away the steamboat ticket alongside caramel wrappers and is making ready to do likewise with the hairpin when the thorn of a revelation pricks her; she carries the pin to her own bedroom, takes out an olivewood box from a bottom drawer and opens it, surveying its array of ivory combs, silver hair brooches, silk nets and artificial white roses. Stuck in the box’s aged blue velvet is a single tortoiseshell hairpin, a perfect match for the one in her hand. 

Ben has fallen asleep again when Rey comes in. She sets his mother’s hairpin atop the bedside table; when she returns an hour later it is gone. 

She walks on her toes to make as little noise as possible and for five days carries his meals upstairs with a wooden tray. She puts her fingers to the pulses in his wrists and the skin of his forehead, searching for signs of septic fever, although Ben submits to these ministrations with an irascible impatience common to most males of his own and many other species. She talks as she moves about her chores through the house, shouting up at him so their conversations take the pitch of two sailors standing on the foredecks of ships about to pass one another. 

“Why’s the roof built this way?” she asks, swatting at cobwebs with a rag; she wheels it above her head like a trick-roper. “It looks like something a bunch of jackdaws put together — the rest of the house seems so sensible.”

“The mountain,” Ben says.

“What?”

“It’s because of the mountain.” He clears his throat. “My grandfather planned the house so its ridge-lines would run alongside the mountain’s.”

“Did he?” Rey straightens the kerchief tied over her hair. “A common man would’ve just built his house turned the other way— the ridges to the west aren’t so steep.”

“My grandmother wanted a porch where she could watch the sun rise,” he says. “And my grandfather wasn’t a common man.”

“Yet another family tradition that’s survived into its third generation, I see.”

He clears his throat again.

Ben also informs her that there are mountains in Colorado so tall their summits wear perpetual mantillas of snow, like the Swiss Alps; there are trees in California that stand over two hundred feet high; there is a canyon in Arizona so deep and so wide it produces the same weightless, ethereal vertigo one gets by looking up into a night sky thick with stars; all through Kansas and Nebraska and South Dakota there are wind storms shaped like swinging lassos, which touch down to earth with the wrath and decimation and inexorability of a divine judgement; there are places in Texas where you can ride for ten miles on a carpet of bluebonnet and prairie fire flowers; there is a lake in the Utah Territory filled with salt, like the lake in Palestine into which the Jordan River runs, except the lake in the Utah Territory is so shallow its borders change every season and leave the land around it prepared as if for consecration. 

“Did you ever get to see the great northern buffalo herd?” Rey asks. “There’s supposed to be more than three million of them running together.”

“There’s only a few thousand now,” Ben says. “The rest have been wiped out, the same as the southern herd. You can find the bones everywhere you walk.”

“Oh.”

She goes quiet; so does he, and Rey looks at his face to consider again what sort of hateful force it would take to unseam a man’s flesh from the center of his brow all the way to his third rib. 

Her stories are smaller and more circumscribed, next to Ben’s, but he listens to them and interrogates her with the cool, quizzical persistence of a typical New England Yankee in regards to their details. She tells him how she had learned about copperhead snakes and lived three months in persecuting terror over the fact that one of the sneaky devils could bite her ankle at any moment, striking her dead-cold as a wagon tire on the spot; she had taken to carrying a big hickory stick and beaten more than a few innocent tree roots senseless as a result. When they first bought Dio he had reared and kicked and sunfished as though possessed by a poltergeist, until Rey learned how nearsighted and scared he was and how she had to talk silly things to him so that he would know they were friends. She had once built a sled from a sheet of tin and gone caroming down the hill, unable to stop, until she ran herself arse-over-tit into a roadside ditch; Rey slaps a hand to her mouth as soon as this last story is out. 

“Excuse me,” Rey says, not that she has enough of an endowment in either category to really warrant using the phrase. “I mean I ran into it full-tilt.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Ben lowers himself into bed as she puts away the spare bandages. “I’m not what anybody would call a gentleman.”

“That’s a fucking relief, then.”

His hair turns flat and lusterless from lack of bathing and so Rey drops him onto a footstool with a dish-towel over his bare shoulders, a bucket between his bent knees, and then pushes him forward to pour out a libation of clean water on his head. She does the washing with castile soap, cold rosemary tea for a rinse, and Ben keeps so deathly still during this production that Rey must kneel to examine him and be sure he has not suffered an apoplectic fit. The six weeks’ worth of good square meals have substantiated the breadth of his waist and the power of his arms, showing him to be one of those men who carries a slight boyish softness in his belly, not that this is particularly easy to discern; he wears his trousers hoisted up so high it looks as though he is anticipating the flood of Genesis. 

Rey scrubs her fingers brusquely through his hair. “You can swim, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Ben says, and she empties another water pitcher over his head in a cascade.

On Sunday he comes downstairs to eat at the table with her, though he does it by setting both feet on each tread like a goutish old man, and shuffles around the house in a similar manner. Twice she is out in the barnyard, combing clumps of ice from the sheep’s wool or picking packed snow from Dio’s hooves, and when she glances up she finds Ben seated at one of the first-floor windows looking out towards the mountain. 

Rey waves to him both times. He does not seem to see her. 

She watches him go about in this distant, curious way three days more, redressing the healing wound on a schedule set by her pillar-and-scroll clock, then finally she is seated across from him at the cleared supper table — she has brewed black tea, about which she has long since learned Americans have addlepated opinions, although it is preferable to their preference for open-coach train cars — and she takes out the pack of his father’s Italian-suited playing cards. 

“Would you like a game?”

Ben raises his eyes to her from the tea. There are several of those galvanized, sparking pulsations through his expression, when he sees the cards, and he does not immediately answer. He wears a brown waistcoat Rey has never seen before, one with loose threads at its collar, and perhaps he has gotten this from that same locked rosewood chest where the photographs are kept. The waistcoat looks a bit taut across his shoulders. 

“What games do you know?” 

“I can play knave out o’doors.” Rey thinks. “And three-card monte, if it counts.”

“The confidence man’s trick? The nun at Tuanul Orphanage didn’t teach you that.”

“No— Sister Lanai taught me five-card stud, but I’m not volunteering to play that against the son of a high-roller.” Rey displays her fingers. “There were some men at the Jakku Cotton Mill back in Manchester who’d pay me to watch their lunch pails and keep the rats away. I learned it from one of them.”

Ben waits, swirling the dregs in his blue-painted porcelain teacup, but finally reaches for the cards to shuffle them. They whirr like hummingbird wings. 

“Knave out o’doors is played with a French-suited deck, but we’ll make do.” He smacks the pack in half. “I don’t have any money for you to win off me, so that just about takes the thrill from all the games I know anyway — but you would’ve already realized that from picking through my pockets, I suppose.”

“You suppose.” Rey scrunches her nose. “Next time I’ll just wash everything and drown all your valuables along with them, if that’d be more to your liking.”

The first card Rey sets down is a numbers card, the nine of swords; Ben sets down a knight of cups, which they decide should come with the same tariff as a queen, so Rey pays out another two cards that prove to both be numbers as well and go straight into Ben’s pile. They cycle through four more turns this way before Rey stops.

“You’ve stacked this deck against me.”

“I’ve stacked it against myself,” Ben reports, blandly. “Be patient. Your next card’s a king of coins.” 

It is. Rey scowls. Ben shrugs, the glib gesture of a magician who has just drawn a bird or a broadsword from the empty air; he had shuffled the deck so quickly it seems to her a pure piece of legerdemain that he had somehow found time to note all the individual cards, as well. 

“Did your father teach you that trick?”

“Yes.” Ben lifts a corner of his halved deck and runs a thumb against the softened edges. “He never let a simple logical calculation of the chances put him off a chosen course of action. ‘Never tell me the odds,’ he’d say — but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try and cheat once in a while. The only man I ever saw who could beat him at cards was Luke in their games of bid whist.”

“Well, that’s to be expected,” Rey says. “Luke learned to play it in the army.”

Ben sets down another card, the three of clubs. “My father learned to play it from one of his deck hands. The Navy had given him a letter of mark and he was using his old merchant vessel to run down rebel blockade runners out of Charleston— that’s how he met Luke and my mother.”

His eyes are on his stack of cards, as he says this, and Rey wins another turn with a king of cups. 

The graves of Han Solo and Leia Organa-Solo up on the mountain record the fact that he was about ten years his wife’s senior, which to Rey as a girl had seemed a bit odd because who on earth would want to marry a farty old man of thirty; the graves also record the fact that Han and Leia had died within a half-year of each other, he in the spring and she in the fall, and it was only after Rey had watched Luke disaffectedly disregard two or three birthdays when it occurred to her as a mathematical conclusion that he and his sister would have been the same age. It was otherwise somewhat easy to forget that Luke had not always been an old man, in one way or another, that he had not always looked out upon the world with his lighthouse-keeper’s gaze and his expression of calm, prophylactic acceptance. Rey has seen several pictures from the War Between the States, dead Confederate boys piled in the Sunken Road at Antietam and dead Union boys stacked onto a handcart at Cold Harbor, although Luke had not lost the right hand until several years afterwards. It had been an accident with a combine harvester; his father had been the one driving their horses when it happened.

Rey collects another three cards from Ben.

“What was the ship’s name?” she asks; he looks up at her. “The one your father used— what was it called?”

A smile goes quickly across Ben’s mouth, showing the wry irregularity of his teeth. 

“ _The Peregrine,”_ he answers.

“Ah.” Rey flicks over one of her cards to see the white falcon printed on its back. “I read in one of Luke’s books that they might be the fastest animals in the world.”

“Only when they’re diving.”

It takes her several more plays to entirely empty Ben’s hand, an inevitable result he greets with a sort of courtly satisfaction, and he overturns his cold tea onto a saucer to read the leaves. He stares down at them, rotating the saucer several times, then swipes it off and thanks her for supper before making his uneven way back up the stairs to bed. A lamp is still burning in his room when Rey passes by it in the hall; she watches its lights and shadows move beneath the closed door. 

…

She manages to keep him resting another few days, although he props the bedroom door open with a boot-jack in the meantime so that he might bellow down unsolicited advice while Rey brine-cures and marinades her game-meats. The only things she has ever been able to hunt for herself are wild turkeys — eating her chickens after their years of steadfast egg-laying service would be a form of betrayal punishable only in Dante’s ninth circle of hell — and gray squirrels, whom she has often caught trying to eat chicks from out of the songbird nests. Ben relocates to the smaller corner bedroom but does not return to the wagonshed; Rey does not ask him to.

She devotes a morning especially to laying out her seed envelopes saved from last year’s harvest, aubergines and tomatoes and beans and peas, and determining what else she wants to plant in the springtime from out of an Ajan Kloss Company seed catalog. It makes for crushingly dull material and so she reads out the corn-catalog jokes that the publishers have sown amidst their descriptions of planting depth and frost hardiness and necessary sun exposure. Ben stands above her to review her selections; they decide upon beets, carrots, sweet yellow corn, oak leaf lettuce, collard greens and pumpkins, despite Ben’s initial protestations. 

“Pumpkins take up ten feet of space for a single plant,” he says. “The only good thing you can make with them is pie.”

“I don’t want them for pies.” Rey reviews a page about blooming trees and selects a black cherry, which bears tart fruit but also bears long white flowers that remind her of scepters. “I want to make jackolanterns for next All-Hallow’s-Eve.”

“You don’t need a patch for that. You can buy them straight off the vine down in the valley.”

Rey uses her pencil to scratch an itch behind her ear. She had first seen a pumpkin at a county fair, the autumn after Luke brought her up onto the mountain. There had been a shiny blue ribbon pinned to its prickly stem and a sign asserting that the pumpkin weighed five hundred and twenty-seven pounds; a farmer had brought it ten miles to the fair with a pair of oxen. Rey had read in a book of fairy stories at the orphanage about how Cinderella’s carriage was made from a bewitched pumpkin, to carry her to the prince’s royal ball, but had never quite imagined the gourd in question would be so alarmingly colored. How the prince could be dim-witted enough to forget about a giant orange carriage but remember the size of his dancing partner’s glassy feet was beyond Rey’s comprehension. 

“But how do you eat it?” Rey had asked, pacing around the prodigious pumpkin. She had won a straw hat in a game of ring toss, with long green ribbons at the back, and kept pulling it down further on her forehead. “Do you have to slice it up like a watermelon?”

“You cut off the top and hull it out.” Luke had kept pulling the straw hat back up, so its brim would not obscure her vision. “Sometimes you can carve a picture into the rind and put a candle inside.”

Rey had experimented with this process several times, cutting out different images with a butcher knife, and each time she had experienced the same peculiar, peaceable satisfaction in setting her pumpkin out in the darkness and then laying the single tongue of fire inside to watch it shine and burn through the gaps. 

She adds some thyme and dill to her seed catalog order before she licks her self-adhering envelope closed with the prim disregard of a cat. 

“I’m getting the pumpkins,” she tells Ben. “If you’re not still crabbed about it by next year I’ll let you carve one, too.” 

He gives her another fatigued look but takes this envelope and carries it to the post office in Exegol when he goes to retrieve her mail. The first week in December there is a Sears-Roebuck package waiting at the mail-room window and he comes riding up the road with a black opera cloak clasped around his throat; he spends two entire days wearing it wherever he goes, swashing it madly about himself with the taunting, savage seductions of a bullfighter and saying nothing whatsoever on the subject, until Rey finally puts on her coat and scarf and goes out to negotiate a surrender. Ben is up in the hayloft when she finds him. 

“You can take that off now,” she says. “I only got it for you as a joke.”

Ben peers down at her. He carries a clothes-prop pole and is using it to scare up vermin from out of the hay. Strong crystalline sunlight from the hayloft’s upper door finds concealed glints of warm brown within his grackle-black hair and picks out the brushed velvet trimming on his cloak. 

“You may have meant it as a joke,” he says. “I’m treating it as an entirely serious matter.”

“You’ll get it dirty.”

“It belongs to me.” He changes his grip on the clothes-prop. “By your estimation it’s the only thing on this farm that does.”

“I didn’t say it like that.” She wears woolen stockings and two different skirts, butternut and canvas, but still stands with her knees braced together in the cold. She had not said this to him word for word, anyway, or at least not those words exactly. “I’ll deed over the outbuildings and the pond to you.”

“Add the orchard and I might be able to countenance it.”

“You’d mismanage the orchard.” Her scarf is up around her nose. Rey pulls it down. “And then you’ll have to make your own spiced peaches instead of eating mine.”

Ben smiles again, that facetious display of teeth and the pull to one side where the scar digs into his cheek; Rey yanks her scarf further away from her face and goes to the wall, where the barn’s yard broom rests on two pegs, and she takes it in her hands to brandish it like a saber. 

“Come down here,” she says, “and we’ll settle this disagreement like gentlemen.”

“I’m not a gentleman, remember.” Ben’s boots thud against the hayloft boards as he backs away from its edge. “You come up here and we’ll settle it like brigands.”

She scales the ladder to the loft with one hand, the other holding the broom; when she gets there Ben has already arranged himself into what may be a _tierce_ position, and within a ten seconds Rey comprehends the hubristic extent of her error. Behind the disciplined, sacrosanct thrusts and parries that give Ben the formality of a paladin is a chaotic force Rey nearly staggers under, the first few times he brings his improvised weapon winging gamesomely up or down against hers. The slow leg does not appear to impede him. 

She knocks him away with the broom, right and left, making it serve her at both ends like a quarterstaff, although in the slums she had sailed into most fights with just her fists and her teeth. Chaff and dust and fragrant hay kick up to cloud the sunlight of the loft so densely they seem to be fighting amidst whirling galaxies. Their quickened breaths steam white and commingle.

Rey slaps aside an upward blow; Ben works the clothes-pole around her broom's handle in a tight circle and pins it to the floor; she jerks backwards to free herself and plants her stance like a stickball batter for another swing; he bends beneath it and scythes her legs straight out from under her; Rey goes down flat on her back in a whuff of hay, sneezes, snatches at the opera cloak to hold him in place and then jacks her leg all the way up. It affords him yet another stereoscopic view of her flouncy underdrawers, of course, but the kick she delivers to his jaw with her congress-gaiter heel probably rattles this view loose from his brain like the brake-shoe off a runaway stagecoach. 

It seems to be largely surprise rather than pain that drops him, the black cloak wafting idiotically around him, and he crashes into the hay three feet from her. He has both hands clutched over his face and his prominent ears are a scalded red beneath his hair. 

Rey rolls onto her side. Ben makes no further sound. 

“Mr. Solo?” Rey asks. “Ben?” She scoots closer. “Your injury didn’t open, did it?”

A crack appears between two of Ben’s long philosophical fingers, parted but still holding his face to show one of those coyote-golden eyes. 

“No,” he says, “but I’ll consider that a hard-won victory on my part.”

Rey settles herself in the hay beside him while she calms the cantering through her blood. “It wasn’t any kind of victory on your part. I won.”

He unhooks the opera cloak to whack chaff from its velvet, rolling his tongue around his mouth to feel for broken teeth. “You cheated. There’s no feet allowed in a duel.”

“If a lady’s got feet she ought to make use of them at every eligible opportunity.” Rey sticks both legs out front of her. “That’s straight from the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules.”

“There’s no feet allowed in boxing, either.”

“And which rules of sportsmanship are you following?”

“The Alderaan Hall athletic curriculum, largely.”

Rey taps her toes together. Barn swallows had nested in the rafters, over the summer, so many of them that she had sat on the back porch every evening to watch their careening acrobatics over the field, and she stares up at the intricate clay grottoes of their emptied nests. “Is that where you went to school?”

“My mother did. It’s down in Connecticut. My grandfather sent her there to see if they couldn’t clean up her language.” Ben rests his head on a bent knee. “She only stayed a year, but there was a fencing-master she liked so much she added his last name to hers when she turned eighteen.”

“‘Organa’?”

“Bail Organa. His wife was the school’s dancing-mistress. Her name was Breha — it probably would’ve been my name too, if I’d been born a girl.”

Ben is posed in such a way that Rey can see the same triangle of pale skin on the back of his neck, flecked like a pebble with its birthmarks. She wonders if he got these marks from his mother, or his father, or from some long-dead great-grandmother, the people who still live deep within him in a hundred thousand intimate details that might one day rise again in a possible son or great-granddaughter bearing all the commonplace heirlooms that will link them to the human cycles of history. 

Rey pulls a piece of hay from her hair and splits it into three parts. She folds the leftmost strand of hay over the others to begin a plait. 

“That’s an interesting name,” she says. “Breha Organa.”

“Not as interesting as yours.” Ben turns his head aside to face her. “Rey, Just Rey — who named you that?”

Rey’s fingers stop. 

Her heart gives a few more dips, until she can hold her breath and clench her teeth to ease it, and she sighs. She watches the breath leave her body and freeze against the air to dissipate in the sunlit loft. 

“You’ll think this is funny,” she answers, “but I named myself.”

Ben straightens. All the mirth goes out of his eyes. 

“You what?” 

“My name,” Rey says. “I gave it to myself. Otherwise I wouldn’t have one.”

“What do you mean?”

She returns to braiding the hay. She bends the piece around itself, around again, shaping it into the internal orderliness of Sister Lanai’s labyrinth with its one way in and one way out. 

“I was ten.” She canvasses the accuracy of this statement. “I might have been ten. I can’t exactly be sure — I know I was born the same year some man swam the English Channel and a horse named Aristides won a race in Kentucky, but Luke let me use a different date for every birthday.”

This was approximately true. Luke had sat her down beneath the front elm tree, two weeks after he brought her from Boston, and had presented her with a card. It had been printed by the Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Statistics and on its front were several dotted lines: name, sex, race, date of birth. The name had been written as Remembrance Nemo and the date of birth as the 30th of May, which Rey changed to always be the Tuesday after Decoration Day so that all the bunting and flags and fresh flowers would still be left up for show. 

“But who took care of you?” Ben asks. “What had people been calling you?”

“I got along all right by myself, eventually. I’d heard my teeth would fall out of my head if I didn’t keep them clean, so I always made certain I had lots of tooth powder.” She had liked limes and oranges, too, had liked sucking the flesh off their wedges — the garbage heaps she dug them from gave off a moiling heat on cold nights, which was even better — and then she chewed their rinds, and could make one fruit last a whole day if she was careful. “If people wanted me they’d say ‘come here’ and if they didn’t they’d say ‘go away.’ It was efficient.”

She chances a glimpse of Ben’s face. He clearly does not find this funny at all, by the hard line of his mouth, which is a shame because Rey had possessed the savage pugnacity of a weasel as a girl and it is a bit amusing to think how that desperate, biting, grasping, outmatched animal is still curled within her, under several layers, although whether this is a trait she shares with her mother or her father or somebody else Rey will clearly never know. 

“What changed when you were ten?” Ben asks. 

Rey lets the plaited hay rest between her fingertips. There was another fairy tale in the orphanage’s storybook about something like this, spinning hay or maybe straw into gold, but Rey had felt a great deal of contempt towards the character in this story, too, the woman who bargained for her own life using the freedom of her firstborn child. 

“I went down the river from Manchester to the port at Liverpool,” Rey says. “There was an ocean steamer docked there. I asked somebody what the ship’s name was and I liked what they told me. I think it was _The New Hope_ — I’d been stowed away three days before I realized it was heading for the Boston in America and not the Boston in Lincolnshire. I figured I’d have to introduce myself to the immigration inspectors whenever we got there, and telling them I was Nobody would make them think I was playing a joke.”

“So you made up a name,” Ben says. “Rey.”

“Rey’s what I wanted for everyday use.” Rey rubs at her nose. It has started to dribble from the cold. “But really it’s Remembrance.”

“Why?”

She considers setting the braided hay atop her head like a demented circlet but instead puts it aside. Her first three days in the ship’s steerage had been spent dizzily retching up everything except her socks and her soul, by the feel of it, while the omnipotent sea had rolled and reared and roared five feet beneath her head, but then her stomach crawled back down into her guts where it belonged and Rey had assessed this inconvenient new development by reviewing her vast fund of knowledge about America. She had seen its image on a toy-shop globe once and decided it was far too big; it was replete with bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, alligators and outlaws named Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane; one of their presidents had been shot in the back of his head while he was sitting in a theatre box; they purportedly spelled it ‘theater’ rather than ‘theatre,’ even if this last demerit was immaterial since Rey would not have been able to read the word either way. 

She had reviewed every girl’s name she could think of, the names of queens and noble ladies and flowers and heavenly virtues, but none struck her as a suitable companion with which to begin her unruly American life. There had been another steerage-class passenger who read to her children from a book, every night, though only a few chapters at a time so that it went by very slowly and was boring in lots of places — it told the same story twice, then gallingly started telling it a third time with a few details changed around — but Rey had lain quiet amidst the salted herring barrels nonetheless to listen. Most of the main characters’ names were at least familiar to her. 

“And he took bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and gave unto them,” the woman read aloud, one evening, “saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you — do this in remembrance of me.’”

Rey had gone to sleep repeating this word with its four syllables. She had never heard it before but suspected it shared some close kinship to ‘memory’ and ‘remember,’ words that in her mind were overlaid by pictures of towers and statutes and gravestones with their letters etched into place so that a hundred years could not erase them. It was the feeling Rey got whenever she walked several blocks before realizing she had forgotten her gloves or her hat, somewhere, the urgency that turned her back around at a run to go and find them. Remembrance was probably for things you could not leave behind, she guessed, things you would go searching for if you lost them, things you carried with you wherever you went. 

“This one’s not on the ship’s manifest, sir,” a big man at Long Wharf had said. “She was hiding in the steerage.”

The Boston immigration inspector had looked over his roll-top desk at her. He glanced at the line of people behind her, with their steam trunks and their bandboxes, then looked back at the girl with her matted hair and pox scars and those wonderful, scrubbed white teeth, and he had sighed. 

“What’s your name, child?”

“Howdy,” Rey had said, like she practiced. “My name is Miss Remembrance.”

“Misremembrance who?”

Dammit, Rey had thought, she forgot all about the second part, so she elbowed the big man standing behind her and ran; she was stealing fresh bread loaves off a windowsill in the North End three weeks later when a fishy-faced little woman wearing white had nearly slammed the window down on her fingers. 

Ben has not said anything else yet, as he awaits her reply in the sluicing light of the hayloft. 

Rey shrugs.

“I liked the word,” she says. “I thought it sounded important.”

“Yes.” Ben swallows, somewhat thickly. “It is.” 

She stands, flapping dust off her skirts and collecting the black opera cloak Ben has outspread across the hay. Her chest feels empty and tight, like an old wineskin, and the cloak is still warm from his wearing of it. 

“Anyway, I won,” she says. “I’ll get this washed for you. You might even have it back, if I’m feeling magnanimous.”

“Thank you.”

She clambers down the ladder and finds Ben is watching her go, when she turns around at the barn door to look. She soaks the cloak in warm water, unsure how to properly clean the velvet, and leaves it to drip on a clothesline strung up in the washroom Leia Organa had at some point intended to be a solarium. Briefly Rey puts the dried cloak on, to feel how its folds embrace and weight upon her; she whisks it off and leaves it hanging from Ben’s bedroom door. 

The next day she finds him tromping out a rectangular space of snow behind the wagonshed, pacing thirty feet by twenty feet and stopping every few courses to work out a finicky place in his bad leg. She watches him repeat this track with mad precision for a good five minutes, wondering if her bafflement is akin to what the people of Jericho felt while watching the Israelites march seven times around their city walls, until Ben snaps around towards her.

“Which variety did you send for?”

Rey steps from the snow into the path he has made. He has worn it straight down to the grass. “Variety of what?”

“Pumpkin,” Ben says. “Was it Yellow Mammoth or Harrison?”

“Fairytale,” Rey answers. “It’s one of the new kinds.”

“Aren’t those the ones they call Cinderellas?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” He backs up to stand ankles-deep in the snow. “Most pumpkins need a good hundred and twenty days for a growing season. I’ll till this plot in April and have them in the ground by May.” He jams his hands into the pockets of the black ulster coat she has purchased for him. “We’ll consider the spot here as yours — I still intend to get the orchard, though.”

It is a day of flat, overcast gray and so cold it damascenes the steely air with a delicate inlay of silver. Dog tracks traversing Rey’s prospective pumpkin patch suggest that Chewie has already come to investigate the day’s doings and moved along to a more entertaining program; another, older set of tracks veering in and out of the woods might be from a deer, or a fox, while a lonely set of larger footprints tells her that Ben has walked here not up from the farmhouse but down from those graves on the mountain. 

“If I cede the orchard to you,” Rey says, “I’d like you to still give me some of the fruits and flowers.”

“I’ll give you all of them.” He steps into the path with her. “I just want the thing on principle.”

“Thank you, Ben.”

He walks past her into the fresh snow. “Of course, Remembrance.”

...

It is already the third Sunday in December — she has a calendar from the Coruscant & Chandrila Perfume Company that tells her so — before Rey goes up into the attic to retrieve a wooden hoop and colored candles for making the Advent wreath. She chops fresh boughs off a young cedar behind the sugaring-house and twists these branches around the wooden hoop in tight bundles, bound together by the scrap wire used for mending her chicken coop. 

Rey wedges the five candles into their cups around the wreath, three purple and one pink and a white one at the center, and has struck a match when she must stop to puzzle over whether she is supposed to light the pink candle yet or not. She keeps the lighted match between her fingers, holding it forth like a testimony while she goes to consult with Luke; she is about halfway into the sitting room before she turns around. 

She shakes her match to extinguish it. She plucks out the five candles, unbraids her woven branches from around the wreath until it is bare and puts it all back where she found it. Stray green needles from the cedar boughs are swept up and tossed off the back porch; it is just warm enough that a heavy bank of mist sits atop the snow. A light rain has been falling since noon. 

She goes back inside. 

“You don’t need to keep bringing an old man like me along for these hullabaloos, you know,” Luke had told her. “They’re mostly meant for young people.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not a young person anymore,” Rey had said in reply, several months shy of her hypothetical eighteenth birthday, “and that you’re not an old man yet.”

She had been seated in the buckboard wagon beside Luke. It was an evening in early spring, with the creeks filled above their banks by freshets pouring off the mountains, and there had been a dance at the town's meeting-hall; Rey had stood up for the banjos in “The Arkansas Traveler,” for the fiddles in “Old Joe Clark,” but had otherwise sat along the wall with Luke while he quibbled over politics with the other guests. It had been a night without moon or stars and so they drove by the light of the wagon’s hanging railroad lantern. 

“That boy Finn seems like a good fellow,” Luke said, hooking the reins over his wooden hand in order to adjust his hat. “There’s some talk that Din Djarin is training him up to serve as our constable in his place — I think he’s taken a shine to you, personally.”

“Finn? He’s already got his eye on Rose Tico at the tinker’s shop. He’s broken the same pocketwatch three times just so he can have a pretense for going to see her.” Rey propped her side-button boots on the wagon’s foot brake. “What makes you say that?”

“Oh, it’s just that I feel I’ve been rather neglectful of my duties. Everybody warned me when I first brought you here about how I’d have to run off all your gentleman callers, and so far I haven’t gotten to threaten a single one.”

“If I ever want a gentleman caller I’ll just buy a free-ranging hog and holler him home every evening for his slop — that’d be the better choice, considering how Finn’s the only worthwhile bachelor in town and he’s already courting another woman. Or he’s trying to, anyhow.”

“Reverend Dameron doesn’t qualify? I’ve heard half the women in his congregation always miss the first ten minutes of his sermons because they take so long at home dressing up their hair.”

“Those women miss the first ten minutes because they don’t need to hear it. He’ll usually repeat himself three or four times more before the sermon’s over.” 

Sheltered under the meditative shade created by his hat’s flat brim, Luke had paused. 

“Han’s old friend Lando still lives out in Chicago," he said. "His daughter Jannah should be about your age, I’d guess — maybe you could spend a summer with them and get to know some new people.” 

“You couldn’t possibly spare me for a whole summer. You’re about as hopeless with sheep as I’d think a man of the cloth could be and I want to put down that rose-bed I’ve been talking about.”

“I’ll be an old man sooner or later, Rey, whether you're willing to believe it or not.” Luke had moved the reins to turn their wagon up the road. “One day you might find yourself wanting somebody else to talk to.”

“I get by quite comfortably with Dio and Chewie for companions, thanks,” she had said, feeling suddenly small and helpless and cruel. “They’re better at knowing when to shut their goddamn mouths.”

Luke may have said something else, here, but Rey would not remember it, because right then she had stood in the moving wagon, kilted up her skirts and leapt off to march the last four miles home by herself. Luke had slowed without stopping, then driven on ahead until she lost sight of the wagon’s lantern; after fifteen minutes it had begun to pour rain, however, and so Luke had turned back around for her, and about two years later Rey had come into the sitting room to find him motionless in his chair and had realized he was dead. 

“Luke,” she had said, while she was still trying to wake him, “I know you told me you wanted us to go for a walk, but I — Luke, are you listening?”

Rey locks the trapdoor to the attic where she has put away the Advent candles and descends into the cool, damp fieldstone root cellar with a coal-oil lamp in her hand. She selects several potatoes and some leeks she keeps stored upright in a bucket of wet sand; she is contemplating the sauerkraut jars — perhaps if she prays hard enough she will someday receive a vision of how one can keep cabbages through the winter without turning them into vitriolic seaweed — when she hears Ben coming into the house upstairs. 

Rey stands very still with the coal-oil lamp as his boots tread the floorboards overhead. Rising air from the lamp’s soot-blacked glass chimney heats her face. The boots stop.

“Rey?”

She drops her potatoes and leeks into a basket before she answers.

“Here,” she calls. “What is it?”

“Where have you put the bow-saw?”

“Have you tried the tool shed?”

“Do you mean the place where every other farmer in the forty-four United States keeps his bow-saw? Great Caesar’s ghost, why didn’t that idea already occur to me?”

“I don’t see what you’d need a saw for. With a mood like that, you could probably make things come to pieces just by talking at them until they fly apart in their hurry to get away from you.” Rey climbs the steep stairs from the root cellar and finds him waiting for her at the top. “What are you trying to cut down?”

Ben pauses, at the sight of her, and a change goes through his face. He is wearing a hat to keep off the light rain but now he removes it. 

“That cedar behind the sugaring-house,” he says; his voice is different, too. “You were trimming it earlier. I can fit it through the front door if I wrap it in burlap first. There should be some sacks in the barn — I noticed you haven’t got a tree up for Christmas yet.”

Rey has remained standing on the highest cellar step while Ben says this and climbs around him. She passes near enough so her skirts catch some of the rainwater slipping off his oilcloth coat; it is not one she has purchased for him and she guesses by its size that it belonged to his father. 

“That’s all right.” She goes into the kitchen and dumps out her potatoes. “It’s a lot of fuss for nothing. It gets needles everywhere and you kill a little tree that was only minding its own business.”

Ben follows her, running a hand down his face to wipe rainwater from his mouth. “If it’s ethics you’re worried about, we can just leave it in the ground and put some garlands on it. My father did that one year to a spruce after he'd broken his arm working with Miss Mothma’s old Hereford bull and couldn’t use an axe.”

Rey is trying to take down a cast-iron crock pot from its hook in the kitchen’s ceiling. Its handle sticks on her first attempt. 

“I haven’t got any ribbons for a garland,” she says, “but if you’re hoping to otherwise replicate the experience, I’m sure Carasynthia Dune’s new Beef Shorthorn will accommodate you.”

Ben lets the hand drop slackly away from his face and comes to fetch down the crock-pot for her. The oilcloth coat is suckered against his shoulders, the black locks of his wet hair forming parentheses against his cheeks. His body radiates a warmth that fogs the air and clings to Rey’s skin. 

She moves aside. He plunks the iron pot down onto the stove.

“My grandfather gave everybody a pomegranate at Christmas, each year — my grandmother was born in Calcutta and he’d pay a garden down in Florida their premium rate to ship them here.” Ben looks at her from a slanted angle, which shows the augury lines of his long, particular nose. “Would that interest you?”

Rey takes a paring knife and sits down at the table with a bowl for collecting potato peels. She has swept away the cedar branches but their wood has left behind a sweet, melancholy red smell that stings her eyes. 

“No,” she says, “it wouldn’t.”

She digs her knife into a potato, letting peels slough off into her bowl. 

Ben pushes a hand several times through his hair. 

“I spent a season working for a farmer and his mother in Kansas,” he says, at last. “They were living in a sod house with tablecloths pinned to the roof so dirt wouldn’t fall down onto their dinner plates. At Christmas his mother took the green papers her sugar-loaves came wrapped in and cut them into these— ” Ben turns his hands, showing their thick-knuckled backs, and hooks his thumbs together so his fingers form the shape of wings “— they were butterflies. She made about a hundred and threaded them onto strings for decoration.”

The lights of the kitchen shimmer in Rey’s vision. She licks her lips at the corners because they are dry and the salt from her tears is starting to irritate them. 

“Is that something you’d like to do?” Ben asks. “We could put them in the sitting room.”

Rey balances her thumb against the paring knife’s blade.

When she had first touched the gray cold in Luke’s hand — it felt like clay — she had flinched away as if from the buzz of a timber rattlesnake; she had stepped back, her eyes shut, because if she looked at his face she knew she would have to remember it that way for the rest of her life; on her way to go fetch the county mortician she had stopped to feed the sheep, since this seemed like an ordinary thing to do and if she did it then maybe the other things that were happening outside her and within her would go away. 

Rey lifts her face to look at Ben. The tears are all over her cheeks and chin but she has not reached up to wipe them yet; he drips more rainwater onto the floor and keeps his hat clasped patiently in his hands. 

“I think I’ve got some of that same colored paper saved,” Rey says. “We could try it.”

The paper used to wrap her twelve-pound sugar loaves is in fact blue, not green, with printed advertisements on one side, and ordinarily Rey keeps it for making dye. After supper they kneel together in front of the sitting room’s stove and Rey draws a pipevine swallowtail butterfly on a piece of paperboard to make a stencil; Ben scrunches down as though shooting marbles while he cuts out each picture, his nose an inch from his work in the severity of his concentration. Rey uses some white embroidery floss to thread each blue butterfly through the wing. 

She can hang them along the mantlepiece but cannot quite reach above the windows; Ben crouches and puts a heavy arm around her waist to raise her up, jostling her once like a bag of oats so that she is properly seated atop his left shoulder. Rey looks down from this reeling new height at the part in his dark hair. 

“You don’t have to do that," she says. "I don’t want you murdering yourself.”

“It’ll be a sorry day when I’m so worn-out that I can’t even manage to hold up a scrap like you,” he says, “but that day’s still a long time off — get to work.”

She strings up the paper butterflies and leaves the curtains open on the chance somebody coming down the road might see them. Ben keeps her borne steadily aloft on his shoulder the whole time, though he shifts pridefully twice or thrice to take some weight off his right leg, and when she is finished he gets the arm around her waist again and holds out his other hand as if offering to help her alight from a carriage. His fingers stay clasped deferentially over hers for a moment, after he bows to set her down, and as he stands some of her hair brushes ticklishly against his face. 

Ben lets her hand go. Something closes hard around Rey’s heart. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. 

His lips move, working around a few first words he does not speak. “What for?”

“The way I spoke to you earlier — you were only trying to be kind.” Rey touches a finger to one of the blue butterflies hanging in the window. The rain has stopped and there is a gibbous moon that puts the spindly shadow of tree branches across the yard. “I haven’t had much practice at missing people, this way. It’s a lot to learn.”

“It is.” Ben steps forward to stand beside her at the window, closing in on his darker reflection until he is near enough to touch it. “Yesterday I was trimming the hooves on that chumpy horse of yours and he tried to kick my head off. I wasn’t even up out of the mud before I wondered what my father would say about it — he’d turn the story into a sort of vaudeville comic’s routine when he told it to my mother.”

The yellow shawl Rey has recently finished knitting is slung over the back of a chair beside the window. She gathers it around herself. 

“You lost them both at nearly the same time, didn’t you?”

“It didn’t feel like that.” Ben folds his arms behind his back. “My father was always going off on new schemes. Usually it was after he and my mother had gotten into a disagreement about the farm, or money, or about me, and those first two weeks after he died seemed like nothing but one more problem he’d run away from. I was so bedded down in my own anger at him, I didn’t pay my mother any mind.” The composure of his face turns strained, in its effortful self-control, and a deep line comes between his brows. The muscles move in his throat. “I’ve never asked you how Luke died.” 

“It was easy for him,” Rey says, which is an abridgement of all the things she had first planned to say on that day in the autumn when she found him risen from the dead and eating her peaches. “I thought he was asleep.”

“Who gave the sermon?”

“Reverend Dameron.”

“Poe Dameron? Shara Bey’s son? I remember when he stole the memorial cannon off the town square and rode it into the Hoosic River. It was a souvenir from the War of 1812.”

“He’s unconventional.”

“I suppose that’s what best suited him for the job.” Ben taps a finger against his jaw, where the scar intersects its symmetry. “What did you put into the coffin with him?”

“His old officer’s sword and his psalter— and his walking boots. He once told me how much he'd hate to rise for the day of Last Judgement wearing those stupid black dress-spats.”

“Yes, that’s the sort of practical thing he'd want to plan for.”

Rey had considered burying Luke with the wooden prosthesis, too, but then had remembered the story about the combine harvester, how Anakin Skywalker had stopped the blood of his son’s ruined right hand with a belt and then managed to carry him the last few hundred feet into the house when Luke fell for a third time. Instead she had kept the hand in an upstairs closet, hanging on a hook within easy reach in case Luke’s spirit ever felt like coming back to get it anyway. 

Ben looks deeper into his reflection in the windowpane, which puts his scar on the opposite side.

“Luke would take me along with him every Sunday, back when he was preaching the circuit between Exegol and Hosnia,” he says. “He may have wanted me to take up the profession in his stead, but that might’ve also been a truth I invented for myself.” His mouth quirks into a smile. “Did he ever pull that trick on you? The one with the piece of straw?”

Rey steps away from the window to take an ironical measure of him. She finds herself suddenly smiling as well. 

“What, his lesson about prayer? Of course he did.” Rey folds her hands, closing her eyes and throwing her voice into a middling mimicry of Luke’s. “Prayer requires a certain posture, Rey. You have to lift yourself up—” she shoots her hands into the air, opening them to show their empty palms, “— no, no, a little higher—”

She hears Ben’s step as he comes closer; his fingers reach out to touch hers, almost imperceptibly, a waggish and teasing flutter against her skin. His own imitation of Luke’s voice is so smooth and accomplished it can only be a talent produced by long practice. 

“Do you feel anything?” he asks, and the first bubbles of snorting laughter rise out of her. “Oh, you do? Already? My, but you must be a regular saint in the making.”

His coy fingers come down to touch the lines in her palm; a violent swoop goes all through Rey’s body, as though she is pumping herself on a child’s swing and has reached that high point of suspended, gathered energy before she hurtles back down.

She opens her eyes and snatches her hands away against her chest; Ben is so close she must look up to see his face. 

“— Then he smacked me on the wrist with a piece of straw,” she says. “And told me, ‘I meant a certain posture of the soul, not the body.’”

“Lucky you.” Ben retracts his hand as well; he goes to stir the fire in the stove. “He smacked me on the ear.”

“He was a bit of a madman, wasn’t he?”

“A bit.”

Rey's blood feels swift and tumbling like a stream through her veins. The fireshine catches in Ben’s hair and limns the lean planes of his profile, as he bends down to open the stove, transfiguring him briefly in much the same way as had the hayloft’s sunlight. Rey draws a long breath. 

“He always hoped you’d come home again,” she says. 

“And I came too late when I did.” Ben closes the stove and stands. “That was always the way of things, between us.” 

“He was never angry with you— not that he ever told me, at least.” The shawl has slipped from her shoulders; Rey tugs it up. “I think he was mostly sorry that you hadn’t waited long enough to say goodbye.”

“Yes.” He keeps his back to her. “I’m sure he was.”

They collect the piecemeal blue papers and embroidery threads from the floor, then sit awhile with the quiet of the fire and the settling house. Before she goes upstairs for the night Rey puts on her boots, walking out into the damp yard to turn back and look at their paper butterfly garlands hanging in the windows; she studies them, long enough so that she can carefully save up the feeling of this moment within herself to survive on later whenever she needs it, and goes back inside. 

… 


End file.
